Thoughts on TikTok's UI

The following was experienced on 30 March 2024.

Last month, I was investigating potential ways to contact someone. To my dismay, I found out that said friend had a TikTok account.

Now, everyone reading this likely already heard a variation of the phrase "TikTok is destroying the attention span of the youth". Now, I do not have the authority to confirm or deny this claim. Conventional wisdom holds that to always assume the worst-case scenario, so I did not watch any video just in case.

My main objective was simply to message my friend in an attempt to reconnect.

For starters I needed to create an account. The "Continue with Facebook" button just straight up doesn't work. Bruh. I ended up making a burner Google account.

Now I needed to message my friend. Here's come the infuriating part, for them to receive the message they must be my "TikTok friend". On a surface level, this seems to be a system like Facebook. There is just one problem though. Nowhere else on the UI (or on the Internet) is the concept of a "TikTok friend" explained. One might natively believe that it's just a wording mistake and that the UI is meant to say "You need to fellow the person first".

So I tried to fellow them. The action seems to work, but upon refreshing the page reveals that the action is not persistent. I am sorry what? Isn't this like a core functionality of that platform?

I concluded that their web UI was broken, so I sadly had to resort to install the app on my phone.

I still experienced the same problem. In the moment, I just assumed the application's UI was utter garbage and purged everything.

In retrospect, I think there was some kind of safeguard against new accounts at play. I do not know what happened, but whatever it was the UI did not tell me. God, what bad UI design.

As the writing of this, I am trying to contact my friend through other means. This might be a long quest. I certainly hope it will not involve TikTok again.

Written by manpaint on 06 April 2024.